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Weimar University

Don Mackintosh

The Rise of Totalitarianism in the US

Father in Heaven, today we ask your blessing to come near to us as we consider this text, and we live in a time where we must choose whether to follow you or to follow other philosophies or ideologies.

So bless us as we think about that today in this special time where many people are thinking about who would be the leader of this nation, but more importantly, the leader in our hearts and homes.

You know, this past week and actually yesterday, we had a graveside service for VRL Chetan or Tatia, as many of us know him.

And I was looking through his Bible and I thought, you know, it's not insignificant You know, it's not insignificant when anyone passes away, but especially someone like Tetia because he hails from a history on a land where he had to live under communist rule.

And you may not have known him, But it would have been a great benefit if you did.

And you may not have been able to understand him because his first language was not English, but it would be a great benefit, probably even worthwhile, to have learned Romanian to talk to him and at least listen to him.

And as I was thinking about it, I thought, you know, actually, I'm going to talk about that today.

I read a book, you know, I read books, actually I read several books this week, And this book that I read called Live Not by a Lie is really gripped my attention.

It was taken from the last words spoken by Alexander Solzhenitsyn who you may have read his book, The Gulag Archipelago.

Anyone ever read those books, Gulag Archipelago?

And this ignorance, not because you are even knowledgeable it appears, this ignorance was very troubling to this author and also to Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who just before he was actually forced to immigrate to the West, wrote an article to the people of Russia and said, basically, Do not continue to live in lies.

This author who was recalling Sulzaneatsyn's words spoke of interviews he conducted with men and women who once lived under communism, and he writes, I asked them, did they think that life in America is drifting towards some sort of totalitarianism?

They were usually surprised by my questions because they considered Americans to be hopelessly naive on the subject.

And they were genuinely angry that their fellow Americans did not realize what was happening.

Well what was happening according to these folks?

1 said, elites and elite institutions are abandoning old-fashioned values based on defending the rights of individual and replacing it with a progressive creed that regards justice in terms of groups.

It encourages people to identify with groups, ethnic groups, sexual groups, gender groups, economic groups or otherwise, and to think of good and evil as a matter of power dynamics among these groups or classes.

And that's exactly what happened in communism.

Under the guise of, quote, diversity, this is another quote from another.

Under the guise of diversity, inclusivity, equality, and other egalitarian jargon, this group creates powerful mechanisms, that is, those in charge of these institutions for controlling thoughts and discourse and marginalizing all who don't agree with them as evil.

It is very hard for Americans who have never lived through this kind of ideological fog, said another, to recognize what is happening, to be sure, whatever this is.

It's not a carbon copy of life in the Soviet bloc with the secret police and the gulag and strict censorship and material deprivation.

And this is precisely where the problem emerges, say the immigrants.

Life in the West remains so free, so prosperous, and this is what blinds Americans to the mounting threats to their liberty and their surrendering of it.

Said another, I was born and raised in the Soviet Union and I'm frankly stunned by how similar some of these developments are as to the way Soviet propaganda operated.

Friends lowering their voices and looking over their shoulders when expressing their views.

Not being willing to say who they're going to vote for because they might get in trouble, they might get cancelled at their job or their work.

Not wearing a hat or a political pin because they might be cancelled again.

It is not the old hard totalitarianism that required an eradication physically of Christianity.

It's a new soft totalitarianism that's led by the government, private institutions, corporations, academia, the university, and media.

It's a form of government that combines political authoritarianism with an ideology that seeks to control all aspects of one's life.

What that is, soft totalitarianism, it exercises control initially in soft forms.

And under the guise of healing a hurting world, helping, healing.

And the ways those are taking away freedoms in this country is by couching it in the language of liberating victims from oppression.

Interesting, speaking of liberty while taking it away.

The great sin of this culture is to stand in the way of the freedom of others to find happiness in any way they wish.

This is always a big deal if you're trying to topple a society.

If you can give people sexual freedom that they don't have under their existing theological or ideological structure, that's a pretty big incentive.

This was a problem in ancient Israel where they're saying, choose you this day, you will serve.

The Canaanites surrounded those in Israel.

They had temples, but those temples were all based on sex.

When you went to church, you went to church or your temple with someone who was not your spouse and you went through all the rituals with the temple prostitute, consummating with an intimate act, naturally those services were quite well attended.

And that's why Joshua was saying, choose you this day who you will serve.

But in our culture today, to even say that there are sexual mores, that there are taboos, that there are rights and wrongs is a sin.

Taking away freedoms by talking about letting people choose what gender they are.

I know it sounds bizarre, but that's how we live.

Freedom of choice, unhinged from morality and virtue.

Emil Durkheim, writing about this, said, many people who had been set free from the bonds of religion did not thrive in their liberty.

In fact, they lost a shared sense of purpose and of meaning and of community.

A number of these despairing people committed suicide.

And then he said what happens to individuals can also happen to societies.

Totalitarian movements advance in times of uncertainty and crisis when people feel vulnerable, when they feel lonely, when they're told to shelter at home for months, and they're scared by either the truth or not the truth, either way, just so long as they're scared.

What prepares men for totality domination, in a non-totalitarian word, is the fact that loneliness, once a borderline experience usually suffered in certain marginal social conditions like old age, becomes an everyday experience of ever-growing masses, wrote Hannah Arendt in 1951 in his book, The Origins of Totalitarianism.

Do we live in a time where people are lonely?

Do we live in a time where they are self-isolating?

We live in a time when they attempt to actually combat loneliness with things that now have been shown to make them more lonely, like Instagram, Facebook.

These are all factual statements I'm making.

The studies show that as social media use has gone up, the amount of friends a person has, has actually gone down.

The amount of people that are really being interacted with has decreased.

And so there's kind of like a fake friendship.

Do you really think your friends on Facebook are your friends?

Whenever I meet a friend on Facebook, I say I'm your friend on Facebook.

And Guess who is giving the greatest support in our nation to the ideas of communism and socialism?

The philosophies that directly are tied to the death of at least 100 million people.

Guess who's giving the most credence to those views?

They're not old enough to know any better and that's 1 of the reasons I'm preaching this sermon today.

And people are too afraid to talk about it.

An abandoning of the defense of the rights of the individual and replacing it with a progressive creed that regards justice in terms of groups and class warfare, encouraging people to identify with ethnic, sexual, economic, or other groups, and to think of good and evil or a great controversy as a matter of power dynamics between those groups.

Basically, you've got to buy into this, you must pay to play.

Universities in California, for instance, teachers who want to apply for tenure tracks.

Maybe 1 of the reasons we might call ourselves something else.

Intergalactic center of learning, I don't know.

Anyway, teachers, that's not gonna pick up, I know.

Teachers who want to apply for tenure-track positions have to affirm their commitment to equality, diversity, and inclusion and to have demonstrated it, Even if it has nothing to do with their field.

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The Rise of Totalitarianism in the US

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